Focusing on what can make a difference

San Francisco MUNI light rail map

One of the "problems" with government policy is that it focuses a lot on equity and not on market reality. There just isn't enough consumer demand in every neighborhood to make it possible to revitalize every commercial district in the city. Plus, for revitalization to work, you have to have a great number of requisite capacity factors already in place. You can't just mandate it to happen...

DC1974 sends us an article about the MUNI transit system in San Francisco, "Key to Muni issues may ride on 10 main corridors, light-rail system." That system has been having a lot of problems. It has tremendous use, comparable or higher than that of the WMATA system. They provide streetcar, electric bus, and regular bus service, only within the 40 square mile City of San Francisco, while suburban commuter service is provided by the separately managed BART system. BART's ridership is about 1/2 of the WMATA subway service.

I think that the MUNI-BART dichotomy offers a way to think about transit service in DC, not a separate system per se, but thinking about the DC transit service more directly in terms of DC objectives and competitive advantages, while at the same time recognize the primacy of regional connectivity and continuing to bring workers to the core of the city.

From the article:

Ten bus corridors and the light-rail system in San Francisco account for 75 percent of the ridership on Muni. Fix those, officials say, and public confidence in the city's oft-disparaged transit system would soar.

"The system lives and dies based on your core routes," said Russ Chisholm, a transportation consultant hired by the city to assess Muni's performance. "It doesn't mean you ignore everything else," he said, "but by actually concentrating on these, you'd have a lot of success."

San Francisco Transit Effectiveness Project

Check out the article for ridership figures on their various lines, which absolutely crush the busiest bus lines in our region. The highest volume routes are all in DC and range from about 15,000 to 20,000 riders, while 7 of the SF buslines have much greater ridership, topping out at almost 79,000 daily riders, and the 8th line is busier than all than the DC 30s busline.

BART map